I listened to one of my State's senators giving a speech on why the trade part of "cap and trade" is very bad all around. Like Europe there are concepts of caps, trade, and offsets.
Caps are self explanatory. This could be regulated in the same way we do water. - Trade is surprisingly complex. In addition to companies being able to straight trade pollution amounts, buying/selling the rights to pollute, what we have seen in Europe is massive financial schemes being intertwined with the trading. Similar to the credit fiasco in the US and around the world, Europe has seen these units of trade being lumped into large groups, and speculated on, borrowed against, etc.. - The absolute largest problem though, is the offsets. These mean, while company A has only 100 'units of pollution' to use, they can offset that, effectively getting 10 extra units, if they say, plant trees in the Amazon. There have been massively flagrant abuses of this offset. One example our Senator gave, was a company burning down a large swath of the Amazon forest, replanting it with all one type of tree, expressly for harvesting the wood to fuel a smelting plant......
The simple answer is a straightforward cap. Sure energy will initially cost more when caps are put in place, then slowly lowered to reduce pollution over time. However, energy companies will have to complete on one level, and one level only, the cost of producing and selling their energy.
Allowing 'trading', the monetization of pollution, offsets, and huge complex credit/financing/borrowing against lumps of pollution units, is ripe for abuse.
Sorry I couldn't find his original cap and trade speech.
"propping up the Shah, funding Iraq in a war against them"
Those were blatant means of changing specific policy/removing governments we didn't like, etc..
I see no reason why the US can't help promote general ideals (freedom of press, etc..) while not commenting on any one leader. I think it is morally correct to pressure Iran into NOT arresting reporters and killing protesters for example.
Obama seems to be increasing the verbal pressure in denouncing some things, which I think it good. However, I see no reason why we should pursue additional means of pressure, sanctions, etc.. whatever.
It is a fine line between 'interferring' and upholding basic human rights. That is, assuming you agree that we should attempt to promote what we consider basic human rights in other nations (I do, but I know that some do not)
"I'd like to ask the slashdot community if they've ever heard of anyone who wanted it having trouble getting pot (or almost any common street drug for that matter)."
That was my experience growing up. It was far easier to get pot than beer when underage. By making it illegal, you are basically making pot the drug of choice for people under 21.
There are tons of ways to store the energy, we just haven't started doing it yet.
Take the columbia river gorge wind turbines. They are situated along the top of the river gorge which is very deep. I could envision that elevation difference being used in conjunction with water turbines to produce electricity. When the turbine is producing more than the grid needs, pump water up the hill to tanks. When the turbines aren't producing enough, let the water flow down the hill in pipes through a water turbine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Another thing being worked on, is a 'smart grid'. Wind is always blowing "somewhere". We just need a smarter grid that can better move the power around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid
Living in Portland, I can attest to our zeal in creating very friendly urban centers. Many young professional couples choose to live in tightly packed neighborhoods along our MAX line (public trans train).
The biggest issue with reviving urban cores, sprucing things up and encouraging people to move in to the center instead of out, is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
Home prices in traditionally low cost areas have skyrocketed. So in addition to making the property tax, home price, etc.. too much for low paid workers, you also cut off their ability to use the public transportation. They are now the ones living way outside of town and having to drive in for work.
And given that, on average, these urban renewal projects occur in pre-dominantly minority neighborhoods, makes for a pretty racially charged environment at times. This rarely takes the form of violence though. Moreso, you'll see minority neighborhoods vigorously campaigning against being the focus of a "renewal".
Historically speaking, the Church/Islam encouraged science purely because they had money to support scientists. There was no such thing as grants or state funding back then. The Church was a big bank. This was not because of anything inherent to Religion that encourages finding objective fact.
"What makes you think that these stupid people won't find something else to latch on to that has the same sort of negative effects as religion?"
There is no guarantee of course. Take scientology for example. However, encouraging any belief that has no basis in truth does not serve society well in the long term.
Perhaps instead of broadly calling religion 'bad', we should encourage people to learn about the history of their religion, and to view it as a personal choice, fully aware that it is not fact, but is instead, something they wish to believe.
The largest problem with religion, given that much of it is faith based, is that faith-based thinking can encroach into areas that it shouldn't. I don't want a airplane engineer taking things on faith when it comes to designing an airplane! Yet time and time again, we see citizens making, for example, health care choices, based on religious beliefs.
"That's why I'm a big proponent of doing our best to avoid unwarranted wealth transfers to areas that do not generate wealth......The problem is mostly politics, and that's why, in the long run socialized programs will fail."
And the problem with arguments like this, is that they almost universally fail to account for the cost to society of not having that 'socialized' program, especially when you add in moral obligations that society has deemed necessary to be considered a civilized nation.
How many children will grow up to become productive with the program or without? How many children will avoid joining gangs saving prison money/lives?
There are tons of studies showing that in some cases, preventative social programs, preventative healthcare, etc.. saves society tax money in the long term.
But usually people are so short sighted, that they say things like "wealth transfer", not realizing that they are saving money in the long term. I know the exact news sources and philosophies that you subscribe to because you used the term 'wealth transfer' (My father is firmly in your right wing viewpoint). It is a loaded term that seeks to distort the reality that social programs can and do save society money, and raise our overall prosperity.
And saying "why I'm a big proponent of doing our best to avoid unwarranted wealth transfers to areas that do not generate wealth" completely ignores any moral obligations.
The hospital that I worked for had to, by law, care for any seriously sick or injured person regardless of their ability to pay. That "wealth transfer" from the hospital into a service for someone with no money, was deemed morally correct, enough so that it became law.
That hospital, and my job, disappeared due to the large amounts of illegal aliens and/or poor folks that knew that going to an emergency room, having waited until they were very sick = free healthcare.
If instead, we had provided preventative healthcare for free to those illegal aliens/and or poor people, and offered other free healthcares, the overall cost to provide service to those people would be LOWER.
That means I would still have my job, and the hospital supporting 4,000 employees would have still been in business.
That is a micro example of course, but extend that to the entire healthcare system as a whole, and you can see the impact it can have on America.
We've been slipping in terms of education compared with other European countries for quite a while now. Would you consider tax payer money used to provide teachers a "wealth transfer" to those that cannot afford private tutors? Most likely not. We know that having an uneducated population is bad for everyone. Why can you not see other, proven, socialized programs in the same light?
"Sorry, I do not agree that the Iranian people would even be interested in anything other than a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy."
And what do you base that conclusion on? The very vocal, extremist, current leadership? I worked with a sys admin who came from Iran, and according to him, the vast majority of the population is in favor of a western style republic.
The current problem is that those currently entrenched in power, are far more passionate, vocal, and willing to justify (possibly) rigging an election to stay in power.
This is very similar to, but of course a more extreme example of, what happened to American politics during the last 8 years. The ultra-conservative fundamentalist, right wing, bordering on facist, religious nuts, managed to convince America that they had somehow become 50% of the population.
This was very evident in most news shows, who gave nearly equal weight to these far right wing views, always portraying an issue as left side, or right side, and somehow the right side had been shifted far far to the right.
Without any actual data to back myself up:), based on knowing a few Iranians, I would hazard a guess that 2/3rds of the population, those under the age of 40, are much more liberal and want a true democracy (or republic). The problem is the 1/3rd of the older generation who are lead by conservative clerics, and are willing to justify any means to achieve their end goals.
If Bush and company hadn't been quite so extreme with their world and local actions (wiretapping, side-stepping the constitution, etc..) I bet this last election would have been a lot closer. We are seeing a similar outcry for change in Iran right now. The current established power has gone too far, and that bottom 2/3rds of the population is starting to react.
Early ZFS had some Oracle issues, but I think that all/majority of those are now patched. We've been running sun ldap, oracle db, tomcat, sun calendar, sun email on zfs in production, with ~24,000 unique visitors a day, and have had zero zfs related problems.
I'm not sure if your scale is far larger or something, but I see no performance difference between oracle on zfs and oracle on UFS/other.
root/boot wasn't originally possible with ZFS. I forget the version numbers, but it only arrived recently. We have some servers that, if I recall correctly, are less than 5 years old, but were setup with non-zfs boot because it was not possible at the time.
I don't know if this particular astronaut is being truthful or lost his mind or not, but in this case, this particular astronaut certainly goes beyond your descriptor "classified as a UFO because no one wants to take the time to find the identification of the debris he observed."
------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell
Dr Edgar Mitchell, said he was aware of several UFO visits during his career, but each one had been covered up.
The 77-year-old, who was a crew member of the Apollo 14 mission, said sources at the space agency had described aliens as resembling âoelittle people who look strange to usâ.
Dr Mitchell told Kerrang! Radio that human technology was âoenot nearly as sophisticatedâ as theirs and had they been hostile, he warned: âoeWe would be been gone by nowâ.
âoeI happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that weâ(TM)ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real.
âoeItâ(TM)s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly itâ(TM)s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.
âoeIâ(TM)ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes â" we have been visited. âoe
I'm with you. I find a lot of the presidents (carter, etc..), astronauts, military pilots, etc.. to be credible witnesses.
If they reported seeing soviet migs flying over our airspace, you could count on our military scrambling interceptors. So why are credible witnesses ignored when reporting UFOs?
There are many reasons (from the fantastic to the mundane) why this could be, but not being a credible skilled witness is not one of them.
Its been done in numerous documentaries already. One that stands out, is of a Japanese airline pilot flying over Alaska reporting being followed by a very visible huge saucer for hours.
I don't recall all the details, but I think they saw it on radar, and the pilot had visual confirmation. And the thing showed up a couple more times and was reported by additional pilots.
People that get so heated about these topics just need to remember that "unidentified != alien"
However, I do find it odd, that if our government had a top secret saucer program, that they would tail a commercial airliner in broad daylight hehe:)
Just like firefighters, police, (and healthcare!) etc.. news is an invaluable asset to a functioning society. Especially a democracy.
It should be funded by the public (NPR-like + tax money). Local newspapers by local towns (or several towns team up), nationwide news funded by the federal government.
There should be strict rules about government influence, and the reporting and story choice processes and methods need to be as transparent as possible. Ideally there should be more than one national news service, perhaps 3 or 4. Each should be governed by a body comprised of publically elected board members. If you feel that the news is not reporting the truth, vote them out. It might make sense to have the 3-4 board elections happen regionally (Northwest news, SW news, etc..)
I too get tired of folks bashing things that don't deserve to be bashed, but at this point, windows jokes are more like blond/preacher/polish/whatever jokes: not true, but amusing if not taken seriously.
1. use a javascript library that has already solved those compatibility issues
2. write standards compliant code with a main controlling stylesheet, and add your little 'bug fix css' section to the bottom that you reuse on each project so it takes zero time to design...
"Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!"
Whoa... have you been frozen in time?
I have not used a table (except for tabular data on occasion) in 5 years.
1. It was the users sharing the files that should be at fault 2. The case was overseen by a biased judge
I think that point 1 is a really big deal for many reasons. What if I created a site in order to allow people in oppressive nations to share political videos and files that would be too dangerous to do themselves? What if a bunch of copyright violators decided to start using it also? In order to protect the privacy of my oppressed clients, I do not store logs, and will not allow anyone to monitor the site. However, say I respond to take down notices, but do to the sheer volume, it takes me a long time to respond to them.
Should I be held accountable?
If you say, "well no, if you are trying to 'keep it clean' it is the users fault not yours.", I think most people, not all, would agree with you. Now, what if I change the title of my site from "Helping Opressed People" to "Sticking it to the RIAA". Everything is the same, just the title changed. Should I be held accountable now, because it appears that my intent is different, despite still complying (slowly) to take down notices?
Now you'll probably respond by saying, "The Pirate Bay did not comply with take down notices" which was true. However, this is a slippery slope in my opinion. I forget which one, but a torrent site is being sued right now, despite complying, and despite not even providing the tracker. They just provide a search mechanism...
I guess what I'm getting at, is how can we ever share information anonymously if every service provider is held accountable for all actions by all users on their service?
If a bought a open lot in a city, cleaned it up, and named it "Fun Park - Open to the public" and a bunch of crack dealers started hanging out in it, am I responsible for the crack dealing? How is that different than a normal public park? The police don't arrest city officials for "facilitating drug selling/use", why would the arrest me? The would though. If it was private land with a bunch of drug dealing going on, I'd get in trouble.
So thinking about the public versus private park analogy again, the solution seems to be, the only way to allow a free, anonymous exchange of information would be a public funded server/service for sharing files and information. Do you really think that will ever happen? And would you feel comfortable as a dissenter/protester publishing to a federally sponsored government server?
There just has to be a legal way to share files without the owner of the service being responsible. So far, very few organizations have been able to pull it off. The only ones that can, have had to devote massive resources to responding to take down notices. And the negative aspect of being so large, is that those organizations often end up complying with other government take down notices, for reasons beyond copyright (such as google/youtube or others removing information, like complying with china's request to filter the ten. square google results).
I agree with you about stability and performance on back-end processes. We have a few clusters of servers that all act to produce 1 portal site. (ldap, database, calendaring, email, integration with our main hr/payroll, etc..)
In the last 5 years, most of the problems have been on the front-end. The user experience. That java is either just coded poorly, or java is poor on the front-end overall.
I've seen some of the vendor provided code for the front, and it always seems bloated and overally complex just to produce a web page. Java heap limitations on the web servers, etc. etc.
So overall, my anecdotal experience is java back-end processes = great, java front-end processes = not so great.
I think this is the result of a IT shops that have a bunch of talented java programmers, trying to use java for everything, when something like coldfusion, php, etc.. would have been a better front-end choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I listened to one of my State's senators giving a speech on why the trade part of "cap and trade" is very bad all around. Like Europe there are concepts of caps, trade, and offsets.
Caps are self explanatory. This could be regulated in the same way we do water.
-
Trade is surprisingly complex. In addition to companies being able to straight trade pollution amounts, buying/selling the rights to pollute, what we have seen in Europe is massive financial schemes being intertwined with the trading. Similar to the credit fiasco in the US and around the world, Europe has seen these units of trade being lumped into large groups, and speculated on, borrowed against, etc..
-
The absolute largest problem though, is the offsets. These mean, while company A has only 100 'units of pollution' to use, they can offset that, effectively getting 10 extra units, if they say, plant trees in the Amazon. There have been massively flagrant abuses of this offset. One example our Senator gave, was a company burning down a large swath of the Amazon forest, replanting it with all one type of tree, expressly for harvesting the wood to fuel a smelting plant......
The simple answer is a straightforward cap. Sure energy will initially cost more when caps are put in place, then slowly lowered to reduce pollution over time. However, energy companies will have to complete on one level, and one level only, the cost of producing and selling their energy.
Allowing 'trading', the monetization of pollution, offsets, and huge complex credit/financing/borrowing against lumps of pollution units, is ripe for abuse.
Sorry I couldn't find his original cap and trade speech.
"propping up the Shah, funding Iraq in a war against them"
Those were blatant means of changing specific policy/removing governments we didn't like, etc..
I see no reason why the US can't help promote general ideals (freedom of press, etc..) while not commenting on any one leader. I think it is morally correct to pressure Iran into NOT arresting reporters and killing protesters for example.
Obama seems to be increasing the verbal pressure in denouncing some things, which I think it good. However, I see no reason why we should pursue additional means of pressure, sanctions, etc.. whatever.
It is a fine line between 'interferring' and upholding basic human rights. That is, assuming you agree that we should attempt to promote what we consider basic human rights in other nations (I do, but I know that some do not)
""Which is why I clearly stated that it would take over a century to pay that 14 trillion ""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/new/html/Fri_Dec_29_151111_2000.html
Clinton had numbers showing how 3 trillion could be payed off in 10 years. Why couldn't 14 trillion be payed off in 40 years?
And you are forgetting that GDP goes up over time. Also, a swing in the value of the dollar changes the real value of the debt.
"I'd like to ask the slashdot community if they've ever heard of anyone who wanted it having trouble getting pot (or almost any common street drug for that matter)."
That was my experience growing up. It was far easier to get pot than beer when underage. By making it illegal, you are basically making pot the drug of choice for people under 21.
There are tons of ways to store the energy, we just haven't started doing it yet.
Take the columbia river gorge wind turbines. They are situated along the top of the river gorge which is very deep. I could envision that elevation difference being used in conjunction with water turbines to produce electricity. When the turbine is producing more than the grid needs, pump water up the hill to tanks. When the turbines aren't producing enough, let the water flow down the hill in pipes through a water turbine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Another thing being worked on, is a 'smart grid'. Wind is always blowing "somewhere". We just need a smarter grid that can better move the power around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid
The giant turbines along the Columbia River Gorge in Washington turn very very slowly. I can't imagine any bird having trouble with those.
Quick google brought this up.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/04/common_misconce.php
In addition to being a flying projectile (harming others in your car) as others have mentioned.
As long as hospitals are required to take care of people whether or not they can pay, and as long as we do not have universal healthcare.....
I'd prefer to have people buckle up. One of the reasons health care is so expensive, is to offset the cost of all the dumb asses.
This is a guess:
The 2nd amendment is one of the few 'rights' that has many large industries lobbying for its continued existence.
The ACLU most likely figures that the 2nd amendment is well taken care of, and does not need their help.
Living in Portland, I can attest to our zeal in creating very friendly urban centers. Many young professional couples choose to live in tightly packed neighborhoods along our MAX line (public trans train).
The biggest issue with reviving urban cores, sprucing things up and encouraging people to move in to the center instead of out, is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
Home prices in traditionally low cost areas have skyrocketed. So in addition to making the property tax, home price, etc.. too much for low paid workers, you also cut off their ability to use the public transportation. They are now the ones living way outside of town and having to drive in for work.
And given that, on average, these urban renewal projects occur in pre-dominantly minority neighborhoods, makes for a pretty racially charged environment at times. This rarely takes the form of violence though. Moreso, you'll see minority neighborhoods vigorously campaigning against being the focus of a "renewal".
Historically speaking, the Church/Islam encouraged science purely because they had money to support scientists. There was no such thing as grants or state funding back then. The Church was a big bank. This was not because of anything inherent to Religion that encourages finding objective fact.
"What makes you think that these stupid people won't find something else to latch on to that has the same sort of negative effects as religion?"
There is no guarantee of course. Take scientology for example. However, encouraging any belief that has no basis in truth does not serve society well in the long term.
Perhaps instead of broadly calling religion 'bad', we should encourage people to learn about the history of their religion, and to view it as a personal choice, fully aware that it is not fact, but is instead, something they wish to believe.
The largest problem with religion, given that much of it is faith based, is that faith-based thinking can encroach into areas that it shouldn't. I don't want a airplane engineer taking things on faith when it comes to designing an airplane! Yet time and time again, we see citizens making, for example, health care choices, based on religious beliefs.
"That's why I'm a big proponent of doing our best to avoid unwarranted wealth transfers to areas that do not generate wealth......The problem is mostly politics, and that's why, in the long run socialized programs will fail."
And the problem with arguments like this, is that they almost universally fail to account for the cost to society of not having that 'socialized' program, especially when you add in moral obligations that society has deemed necessary to be considered a civilized nation.
For instance, tax payer money funding programs built from research here: http://www.nectac.org/topics/quality/effective.asp#longterm in an inner city where parents would not be able to afford pre-school by themselves.
How many children will grow up to become productive with the program or without?
How many children will avoid joining gangs saving prison money/lives?
There are tons of studies showing that in some cases, preventative social programs, preventative healthcare, etc.. saves society tax money in the long term.
But usually people are so short sighted, that they say things like "wealth transfer", not realizing that they are saving money in the long term. I know the exact news sources and philosophies that you subscribe to because you used the term 'wealth transfer' (My father is firmly in your right wing viewpoint). It is a loaded term that seeks to distort the reality that social programs can and do save society money, and raise our overall prosperity.
And saying "why I'm a big proponent of doing our best to avoid unwarranted wealth transfers to areas that do not generate wealth" completely ignores any moral obligations.
The hospital that I worked for had to, by law, care for any seriously sick or injured person regardless of their ability to pay. That "wealth transfer" from the hospital into a service for someone with no money, was deemed morally correct, enough so that it became law.
That hospital, and my job, disappeared due to the large amounts of illegal aliens and/or poor folks that knew that going to an emergency room, having waited until they were very sick = free healthcare.
If instead, we had provided preventative healthcare for free to those illegal aliens/and or poor people, and offered other free healthcares, the overall cost to provide service to those people would be LOWER.
That means I would still have my job, and the hospital supporting 4,000 employees would have still been in business.
That is a micro example of course, but extend that to the entire healthcare system as a whole, and you can see the impact it can have on America.
We've been slipping in terms of education compared with other European countries for quite a while now. Would you consider tax payer money used to provide teachers a "wealth transfer" to those that cannot afford private tutors? Most likely not. We know that having an uneducated population is bad for everyone. Why can you not see other, proven, socialized programs in the same light?
"Sorry, I do not agree that the Iranian people would even be interested in anything other than a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy."
And what do you base that conclusion on? The very vocal, extremist, current leadership? I worked with a sys admin who came from Iran, and according to him, the vast majority of the population is in favor of a western style republic.
The current problem is that those currently entrenched in power, are far more passionate, vocal, and willing to justify (possibly) rigging an election to stay in power.
This is very similar to, but of course a more extreme example of, what happened to American politics during the last 8 years. The ultra-conservative fundamentalist, right wing, bordering on facist, religious nuts, managed to convince America that they had somehow become 50% of the population.
This was very evident in most news shows, who gave nearly equal weight to these far right wing views, always portraying an issue as left side, or right side, and somehow the right side had been shifted far far to the right.
Without any actual data to back myself up:), based on knowing a few Iranians, I would hazard a guess that 2/3rds of the population, those under the age of 40, are much more liberal and want a true democracy (or republic). The problem is the 1/3rd of the older generation who are lead by conservative clerics, and are willing to justify any means to achieve their end goals.
If Bush and company hadn't been quite so extreme with their world and local actions (wiretapping, side-stepping the constitution, etc..) I bet this last election would have been a lot closer. We are seeing a similar outcry for change in Iran right now. The current established power has gone too far, and that bottom 2/3rds of the population is starting to react.
Early ZFS had some Oracle issues, but I think that all/majority of those are now patched. We've been running sun ldap, oracle db, tomcat, sun calendar, sun email on zfs in production, with ~24,000 unique visitors a day, and have had zero zfs related problems.
I'm not sure if your scale is far larger or something, but I see no performance difference between oracle on zfs and oracle on UFS/other.
root/boot wasn't originally possible with ZFS. I forget the version numbers, but it only arrived recently. We have some servers that, if I recall correctly, are less than 5 years old, but were setup with non-zfs boot because it was not possible at the time.
Appearance-wise it is very google-like. Spend some time searching though and you can quickly see bias.....
I just spent some time doing very specific technical searches for info about aspects of solaris. I kept getting msdn results in the top 5....
I don't know if this particular astronaut is being truthful or lost his mind or not, but in this case, this particular astronaut certainly goes beyond your descriptor "classified as a UFO because no one wants to take the time to find the identification of the debris he observed."
------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell
Dr Edgar Mitchell, said he was aware of several UFO visits during his career, but each one had been covered up.
The 77-year-old, who was a crew member of the Apollo 14 mission, said sources at the space agency had described aliens as resembling âoelittle people who look strange to usâ.
Dr Mitchell told Kerrang! Radio that human technology was âoenot nearly as sophisticatedâ as theirs and had they been hostile, he warned: âoeWe would be been gone by nowâ.
âoeI happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that weâ(TM)ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real.
âoeItâ(TM)s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly itâ(TM)s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.
âoeIâ(TM)ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes â" we have been visited. âoe
I'm with you. I find a lot of the presidents (carter, etc..), astronauts, military pilots, etc.. to be credible witnesses.
If they reported seeing soviet migs flying over our airspace, you could count on our military scrambling interceptors. So why are credible witnesses ignored when reporting UFOs?
There are many reasons (from the fantastic to the mundane) why this could be, but not being a credible skilled witness is not one of them.
Its been done in numerous documentaries already. One that stands out, is of a Japanese airline pilot flying over Alaska reporting being followed by a very visible huge saucer for hours.
I don't recall all the details, but I think they saw it on radar, and the pilot had visual confirmation. And the thing showed up a couple more times and was reported by additional pilots.
People that get so heated about these topics just need to remember that "unidentified != alien"
However, I do find it odd, that if our government had a top secret saucer program, that they would tail a commercial airliner in broad daylight hehe:)
Just like firefighters, police, (and healthcare!) etc.. news is an invaluable asset to a functioning society. Especially a democracy.
It should be funded by the public (NPR-like + tax money). Local newspapers by local towns (or several towns team up), nationwide news funded by the federal government.
There should be strict rules about government influence, and the reporting and story choice processes and methods need to be as transparent as possible. Ideally there should be more than one national news service, perhaps 3 or 4. Each should be governed by a body comprised of publically elected board members. If you feel that the news is not reporting the truth, vote them out. It might make sense to have the 3-4 board elections happen regionally (Northwest news, SW news, etc..)
I too get tired of folks bashing things that don't deserve to be bashed, but at this point, windows jokes are more like blond/preacher/polish/whatever jokes: not true, but amusing if not taken seriously.
Well obviously you don't give the envelope of passwords to a person who lacks sufficient authority to know them.....
Every IT shop that I have worked for had their passwords stored in safes that the managers and the managers' managers had access to.
If you can't trust the manager of the IT shop, passwords security is moot heh.
Or, you could...
1. use a javascript library that has already solved those compatibility issues
2. write standards compliant code with a main controlling stylesheet, and add your little 'bug fix css' section to the bottom that you reuse on each project so it takes zero time to design...
"Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!"
Whoa... have you been frozen in time?
I have not used a table (except for tabular data on occasion) in 5 years.
www.pcc.edu, my.pcc.edu for example.
I sided with the PirateBay because:
1. It was the users sharing the files that should be at fault
2. The case was overseen by a biased judge
I think that point 1 is a really big deal for many reasons. What if I created a site in order to allow people in oppressive nations to share political videos and files that would be too dangerous to do themselves? What if a bunch of copyright violators decided to start using it also? In order to protect the privacy of my oppressed clients, I do not store logs, and will not allow anyone to monitor the site. However, say I respond to take down notices, but do to the sheer volume, it takes me a long time to respond to them.
Should I be held accountable?
If you say, "well no, if you are trying to 'keep it clean' it is the users fault not yours.", I think most people, not all, would agree with you. Now, what if I change the title of my site from "Helping Opressed People" to "Sticking it to the RIAA". Everything is the same, just the title changed. Should I be held accountable now, because it appears that my intent is different, despite still complying (slowly) to take down notices?
Now you'll probably respond by saying, "The Pirate Bay did not comply with take down notices" which was true. However, this is a slippery slope in my opinion. I forget which one, but a torrent site is being sued right now, despite complying, and despite not even providing the tracker. They just provide a search mechanism...
I guess what I'm getting at, is how can we ever share information anonymously if every service provider is held accountable for all actions by all users on their service?
If a bought a open lot in a city, cleaned it up, and named it "Fun Park - Open to the public" and a bunch of crack dealers started hanging out in it, am I responsible for the crack dealing? How is that different than a normal public park? The police don't arrest city officials for "facilitating drug selling/use", why would the arrest me? The would though. If it was private land with a bunch of drug dealing going on, I'd get in trouble.
So thinking about the public versus private park analogy again, the solution seems to be, the only way to allow a free, anonymous exchange of information would be a public funded server/service for sharing files and information. Do you really think that will ever happen? And would you feel comfortable as a dissenter/protester publishing to a federally sponsored government server?
There just has to be a legal way to share files without the owner of the service being responsible. So far, very few organizations have been able to pull it off. The only ones that can, have had to devote massive resources to responding to take down notices. And the negative aspect of being so large, is that those organizations often end up complying with other government take down notices, for reasons beyond copyright (such as google/youtube or others removing information, like complying with china's request to filter the ten. square google results).
I agree with you about stability and performance on back-end processes. We have a few clusters of servers that all act to produce 1 portal site. (ldap, database, calendaring, email, integration with our main hr/payroll, etc..)
In the last 5 years, most of the problems have been on the front-end. The user experience. That java is either just coded poorly, or java is poor on the front-end overall.
I've seen some of the vendor provided code for the front, and it always seems bloated and overally complex just to produce a web page. Java heap limitations on the web servers, etc. etc.
So overall, my anecdotal experience is java back-end processes = great, java front-end processes = not so great.
I think this is the result of a IT shops that have a bunch of talented java programmers, trying to use java for everything, when something like coldfusion, php, etc.. would have been a better front-end choice.